My mother loved reading Mills & Boon (M&B) romances. She would find time only late at night, after all the chores were done and we were in bed. That is when she would read under the dim light in the passage between the two bedrooms.

She would replenish her booty of slim paperbacks with the sweetheart pink rose logo every Sunday from the club library. During these visits, I tagged along, pre-adolescent and curious.

Members were allowed to borrow only two books a week and that rather cramped my style until I figured out that I could use the hour my mother browsed the extensive collection of romance novels — Barabara Cartland, Georgette Heyer, Denise Robins — to finish a book. (Not that I could finish them so fast, at least not at the beginning.)

The first M&B I ever read, I filched from my mother and read in secret by torchlight, under my blanket. The love story of a retired sportsman and his young fan.

The year I turned 16, my mother handed me my first legitimate romance novella — a Barbara Cartland — with suitable flourish. I do not remember the name of the book so many years later, but I still remember the cover page with the image of a girl in blue with too-large cornflower blue eyes peering out of a heart-shaped face. My Chosen One was a story about an 18-year-old’s introduction to London high society. All I recall of her now is that she was called Anne and how as she went through adventure after adventure while hunting for Mr Right, she had a solid support in a much older man. She eventually fell in love with him, much to my horror. So what if he was a handsome earl, he was 13 years older to her!

A steady diet of romances later — a lot of which featured heroes who were much older than the heroines — I became more tolerant of the age gap. That and the little fact that I married someone a decade older than me. My friend, on the other hand, the one who never shared my enthusiasm for these saccharine paperbacks, married her classmate.

Old habits die hard. Not long ago I discovered e-books and I turned the search on romances. Ever since, I have been guzzling romances by the second. Last week, I consumed eight, the week before, six.

The romances I devour now work on the same formula. Hero meets heroine under adverse circumstances, they fall in love, there is a misunderstanding and they go separate ways, and then there’s a miraculous solution and a happily ever after.

The last book I read last week was set in the 19th century and the extremely intelligent and fabulously wealthy hero was hoodwinked by the heroine — who believes in women’s suffrage and equality — into giving her a job as his secretary. But she had to turn up in men’s clothes and he addressed her as Mister.

I realised that somewhere along the line I must have changed because now these books amuse me more than anything. Take the one set in 12th century England with a 16-year-old heroine. She has been beaten into submission by her baron husband. Nothing funny there, of course, except that this woman, once widowed, readily agrees to marry a giant of a Scotsman just because he promises, “I don’t bite.” Yes, in those exact words.

Then there’s the one about a Maris of Langumont, a strong, vocal woman who knows enough about healing to save lives and has been schooled by her father to mind her estate efficiently. It takes this paragon of virtue almost three-fourths of the rather thick book to realise she is in love with the young knight she had met two pages into the book and had already kissed by Page 15.

And that brings me to possibly the most disturbing thing I have noticed about the romances I now read, even the new historical ones. As far as I remember, in the old books, people kissed only after they had fallen in love. Sometimes lips only continued to quiver with desire even after having declared their love for each other. Holding hands was the epitome of gestures romantic. Interlocked fingers had enough chemistry to set a lab on fire. But in the books I come across now, people kiss, caress, and sometimes even get married, before realising they have fallen in love. Fools, I tell myself as I recall those lines I read once upon a rosy pink time. They went: Stephen kissed me in the spring,/Robin in the fall,/But Colin only looked at me/And never kissed at all./Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest,/Robin’s lost in play,/But the kiss in Colin’s eyes/Haunts me night and day.